Recently, one of our readers
sent in material from a company called PSI TECH (We are always grateful
for this, by the way.). While reading the promotional pamphlet, I was
astounded by the claims that were made by this company. "PSI TECH psychically
discovers the reason for an air plane crash"1 and "PSI TECH
works on finding Saddam Hussein, i.e., his mind, intent, motivation,
emotional and behavioral states, in order to penetrate his war room..."2

The claims of
the promotional material soon got me to dig into PSI TECH, thinking
it would be nothing more than a ghost hunt. But I soon discovered that
PSI TECH's claims of participation with the government were genuine.

The Firm

PSI TECH, founded
by Ed Dames, is a Hawaiian based company whose main offering is to enhance
an individual's psychic abilities via "Technical Remote Viewing" (TRV).
TRV it claims is an "evolved form of Remote Viewing...and it allows
a person to access the information stored in the collective unconscious
('mind field' or global unitary mind), also known as the Akashic
Records or, in TRV terminology, the Matrix."7

PSI TECH has
transitioned from the military sector to the public sector, having trained,
it claims, a total of 12,000 psychic viewers. Academy Award nominee,
William Gazecki, directed PSI TECH's training video8. These
psychic-espionage trade secrets go for the introductory videotape offer
of $49.00. The personal 10-day training course goes for a hefty $4,500.00
(slightly higher than dialing the Psychic Hotline).

Ed Dames and
his team train individuals to become "remote viewers" who witness distant
events psychically. Using a modification of the army course, civilians
can now observe enemy planes in Iraq from their living rooms. Or they
may even foresee the future--the other bonus--like modern Delphic Oracles,
a huge selling point (imagine foreseeing the next stock market superstar--say,
the next Microsoft.).

How does one
become a remote viewer? According to Ed Dames, first by "getting in
touch with yourself" and searching your inward feelings and senses.
PSI TECH soon enters a labyrinth of technojargon:

The TRV techniques
result in an accurate transfer of information from the viewer's unconscious
mind into the conscious awareness, before the aware, creative, and analytical
part of the mind has time to distort, contaminate, or otherwise interfere
with the data flow. The target information is then converted into words
or sketches, using only a pen and plain white paper. During this process,
the viewer becomes linked directly to the collective unconscious--the
Matrix.9

Note: these PSI
TECH experts don't believe they can become psychic by ordinary empirical
observation: seeing, touching, tasting, feeling, or hearing. They say
that there exists certain frequencies which translate into the consciousness
as feelings or visions. The latter are then further translated as real
events--a kind of knowledge through osmosis.

According to
PSI TECH, the more that its subjects focus-in on a certain event, the
more accurate they are going to be in their observations and predictions.10
We will see how accurate they are later.

The Prophet
of Psi Tech

The commanding
force behind PSI TECH is its charismatic leader, Ed Dames. At 17, he
joined the U.S. Army as a paratrooper. After seven years in Asia, he
returned home to complete a double major in Chinese and Bioelectronics
from the University of California Berkeley. He then led a government
military program on the paranormal and secret intelligence. After the
contract ended, he took his elite gang of five people and headed out
to Beverly Hills, founding PSI TECH in 1984.

Ed Dames, who
is energetic and enthusiastic, has the presence of a Vietnam Spec 4
combat hero combined with agent Mulder of X-Files fame. He is confident
when he speaks and his military manner of "Yes sir" and "No sir" can
be heard frequently in his public dialogue, endearing him with his listeners.
With intense eyes, and a surfer blond haircut, the 50 year old Ed Dames
is getting considerable public attention from his psychic claims and
visionary forecasts of the future. Dames has been profiled on CBS, NBC,
UPN and shows such as Inside Edition11. Art Bell frequently
has Dames as a guest on his popular late night show, a remote viewing
enthusiast himself.

Dames does not
come across as only some pragmatic soldier who sees psychic techniques
as weapons to win a war, but is also very "religious," and is often
quoting the Bible--but with an occult twist that is finely packaged
in Christian terminology. This makes him especially seductive. Unlike
most New Agers touting multiculturalism, Dames "feels" like a biblical
conservative (He cannot tolerate homosexuality, which he calls a deconstruction
of the family and the "abomination of desolation."12 ) and
this makes him a deceptive lure with the Christian listening audience
who often buy into his claims.

Yet Dames often
betrays his real spiritual allegiances. He applauds Ingo Swann, the
New Age psychic and originator of Coordinate Remote Viewing protocols14
as well as Nostradamus, the Kabalistic medieval soothsayer among others.

Dames also knows
that nothing quite grabs an audience like talk of apocalyptic events.
In an interview with Art Bell, Dames spoke on the "last days", as biblical
passages were reinterpreted via remote viewing:

What I said was
it appears that what in biblical prophecy is termed the sixth seal .
. . is about to happen, based upon TRV information. . . At PSI TECH,
what we are describing as volcanism, a lot of volcanoes, causing what
the bible, the King James version describes as the moon turning blood
red and the sun becoming black. Those events appear to be imminent.

Ed Dames then
interjected a New Age slant on a popular passage in Revelation about
the beast,

And the beast
we thought might equate with an individual but it did not. It is the
animal nature of man, as opposed to the divine nature
of man.

Stop, a red
flag! Biblically, man does not have a divine nature. This is
a New Age concept right at the starting gate.

Dames then tried
to show how TRV can give modern readers the true interpretation of the
Bible. But his new breakthrough is really only a click away from the
same old psychic channeling that New Agers have used for years. Dames
told Art Bell:

. . . Technical
Remote Viewing bypasses that problem [of language translation] by going
directly to the idea as it exists as a pattern of information, and downloading
it to the individual remote viewer, and the individual remote viewer's
own lexicon expresses what they're perceiving. That lexicon is of course
contemporary. And that way we can put this ancient information in terms
of today's knowledge. [emphasis added]15

Just take a course
in remote viewing and you too can become a psychic theologian.16
Biblical maturity, faithfulness to the scripture and the ancient
languages are now irrelevant.

Military Assignments

What missions
have Ed Dames and PSI TECH been involved in? In 1981, Ed Dames and his
psychic spooks were officially selected by the military to use their
remote viewing techniques to identify secret Soviet weapons.17
In 1991, PSI TECH aided the National Security Council, by using remote
viewing to find Iraq's hidden biological warfare stockpiles.18
Imagine a group of soldiers sitting around yoga style, meditating, trying
to harness the power of the universe in order to find inward clues to
where enemy weapons might hide. It's X-Files material all the way.

Ed Dames, under
the code name MJ5, led a group of government physicists in a paranormal
investigation in New Mexico. This is one topic that Dames won't comment
about19. The U.S. Army, collaborating with Stanford University,
poured thousands of research dollars into the psychic project. "Nevertheless,
the U.S Army began a funded study at Stanford Research Institute to
systematize psychic phenomenon and develop a psychic tool by which "non-psychics"
would also be able to utilize psychic functioning for the purposes of
acquiring reliable and consistent information."20 I wonder
how much that cost us taxpayers?

Dames appears
to be sincerely concerned about the protection of children, believing
Satan is directly involved in the abuses of children.21 And
he has had media attention when PSI TECH has been called to find lost
children, with mixed results.

PSI TECH received
media attention when it allegedly remote viewed TWA Flight 800 and claimed
to identify the cause of the crash. PSI Tech focused their minds on
pictures of the airplane. After forty-five minutes, they a said the
crash was due to a problem with a fuel pump "activator".23
Wreckage investigators did recover much of the aircraft, and indeed
a piece of the fuel pump did puncture the fuel tank, causing the explosion.
This seemed to be a "hit."

Airplane crashes
have since then become the group's hobbyhorse. After the recent crash
of Egypt Air 990, PSI TECH has been trying to solve the riddle of the
crash. Their discovery?

One of the crew
members, or it could have been a flight attendant, was not a passenger
and attacked the pilot from behind. It was a very violent altercation
that followed. Members of the crew tried to hold down a single individual,
but the individual got up again and started, and essentially went postal
in the cockpit. That is why, when the cockpit voice recorder is retrieved....
you'll hear that on the recorder.24

Recent reports
do indeed show that a fellow crew member may have been responsible for
the crash. Is this information really accredited to remote viewing or
could one simply make an educated guess by reading the newspapers and
checking news sources? Many of the same theories were in the media before
Ed Dames ever gave his prediction.

Contradictions
and Inconsistencies

After hunting
around on the Internet for hours trying to find anything I could on
Ed Dames and remote viewing, I found very little opposing him and PSI
TECH. On one web site, an author named Peter P.25 lists his
suspicions regarding Ed Dame's predictions. For example, according to
Joe McMoneagel, a government agent on remote viewing and friend of Ed
Dames, remote viewing is accurate from 35 to 85 percent26.
Ed Dames claims that "the best we as individuals can do, even the experts,
is about 90 percent. However, when a team of remote viewers, five or
six people can work alone, independently, the mutually corroborating
data is 100% correct."27 That's some claim.

In
order for a PSI to have 100% accuracy in its predictions, it must have
no errors. But the errors are plentiful and easily documented. Peter
catches one of many errors in Ed Dames' predictions. Peter demonstrates
Dames' error rate:

In November of
1997, Dames predicted a nuclear incident. "We used the search cue of
'next nuclear attack' and We qualified that with 'intent to kill' and
'massive casualties', and what WE got was a very clear picture at the
end of a week [of sessions], of the North Koreans using a nuclear weapon
against the South Korean. Now analytically we think...analytically,
now...that this event may occur before the end of winter."

Art Bell, the
radio host interviewing Dames, asked, "before the end of this winter?"
Dames confirmed. "Before the end of winter."28 It didn't
happen!

In a later broadcast,
Dames rationalized the miss with psychobabble, "When we search out a
specific target, if we do not constrain the search to time--to the present,
the future, or the past--then we don't know where we are in time...You
want to constrain the search to a certain era, a certain point in time."29

So how did Dames
explain [away] the non-occurrence of his predicted event, come late
April; over a full month into Spring?

The answer: by
explaining that PSI TECH cannot "accurately look at time windows."30
That is, they cannot predict when events will happen very accurately.
So, he is no different from the average tea leaf reader in results.

Indeed, scores
of Ed Dames' false prophecies have been documented, ranging from global
economic collapses to rampant encounters of cannibalism in Eastern Europe.
In fact, in 1998 alone, only 25% of Ed Dames' predictions came true.31
And when Peter posted his findings on the PSI TECH Internet forum, he
was quickly banned from the website. Peter tells his story,

My "raw TRV data
versus postulations" question has gone unanswered, since the question
no longer exists on-site...Dames admitted deleting my messages and password,
"as part of his desire to trim irrelevant and argumentative posts from
the BB (bulletin board)."...The PSI TECH webmaster concluded by suggesting
I could write Dames directly but added, "although he rarely feels any
need to justify his actions." What more can be said?32

Extra Biblical
Prophet?

Does Ed Dames
meet the standards of a true biblical prophet or is he just one more
wizard? The prophets of the Bible spoke the word of God and it came
true to the letter33 and was consistent with the full canon
of revelation. God revealed things for a purpose. Prophets also foretold
future events accurately--this was indeed "out of the ordinary"--because
God revealed it, not because they were Old Testament psychics. When
Noah preached to his countrymen, to repent or be destroyed by a flood34,
the knowledge came not because Noah was using remote viewing, but because
God told him personally and specifically. Here is the clincher. Biblical
prophets must be 100% correct--and this is a key criterion for being
a true prophet. Ed Dames, meanwhile, is only 35% correct at most. The
answer: he fails the test miserably.

It has been the
position of the church that since the death of the last apostles, there
has been no new revelation. The Bible is a sealed book, a whole and
complete canon. The key purpose of New Testament prophetic utterances
was to testify to the Messiahship of Jesus Christ and the validity of
the apostles as God's chosen representatives.35 They also
armed the church by preparing believers for what lay ahead. Meanwhile,
the apostles never acquired glory or money for their prophecies, but
always pointed towards God's glory. They did not start Holy Spirit
Inc like most of today's New Age seminars.

One cannot obtain
eternal life through the "gospel" of PSI TECH, which is yet another
New Age/Christian hybrid in our era. And its prophet, Ed Dames, as we
have said, fails the necessary 100 percent accuracy score needed to
qualify him as a true prophet, a separate issue from his divergence
from revelation.

When he occasionally
gets a "hit", it is probably not because he has psychic abilities, but
because he playing with loaded dice. Dames predicts outcomes that are
either coincidental or highly predictable. Yet according to Dames theory,
he should have a 100% certainty---say, even of knowing who is going
to win the next election. With odds like that, he should be playing
at the Sands in Las Vegas rather than on the sands of Hawaii.

Saint Augustine
said it best "we think God's thoughts after Him." Most of us,
according to Romans, can only know what God has revealed from His creation
and His Scripture by means of our ordinary senses (under the Holy Spirit
with believers).37 Knowledge that is revealed extraordinarily,
like God speaking to Moses at Mt. Sinai, only comes by God's special
revelation.

If God has completed
his revelations and prophecies in the complete canon of scripture for
the purpose of equipping the church across the ages, then such special
revelation is no longer in effect or necessary--not until the Second
Coming. So, when you hear Ed Dames say that through remote viewing he
can predict the future with 100% accuracy, he is doubly wrong!

Beware of
false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly
they are ravening wolves. (Matthew 7:15)

Edward Schneider
is the Business Manager of SCP. He holds a degree in Philosophy from
UC Berkeley and is currently working on a Master's degree in Apologetics
from Bahnsen Theological Seminary. He is the coauthor of Subduing
Science: The Reformation of Natural Philosophy as well as other
theological writings.